When it comes to grand ambition, the impresarios of the Las Vegas Strip are mere pikers next to Budget Suites
owner Robert Bigelow. For his next hotel enterprise, Bigelow is looking
beyond the bright lights of Las Vegas—beyond Earth’s atmosphere, in
fact.

He is actively engaged in an effort to build the planet’s first
orbiting space hotel.

For its water show,
this hotel will have all of Earth’s blue oceans flying past its windows
at 17,500 miles an hour. Guests on board the 330-cubic-meter station
(about the size of a three-bedroom house) will learn weightless
acrobatics, marvel at the ever-changing face of the home planet, and,
for half of every 90-minute orbit, gaze deep into a galaxy ablaze with
billions of stars.

Developed at NASA
as part of a project called TransHab, inflatable space-station modules
have some important advantages over their tin-can counterparts. They
weigh significantly less, and they launch in a compressed state, with
their fabric hulls wrapped tightly around their rigid cores like a roll
of paper towels. This allows them to use less-powerful launch vehicles
and makes for roomier space stations.

After a rocket
fires a Nautilus into space, explosive bolts will release the girdle
securing the compressed hull, and then the station’s life support
system, housed in the core, will inflate the structure with breathable
air, expanding it from 15 feet in diameter to 22 feet.

 Power comes from
solar panels that unfold from the rigid bulkheads at each end of the
module. Each bulkhead also houses an airlock and a docking adaptor.
Astronauts arriving later enter a shirtsleeve environment in which they
can go to work unpacking removable panels, equipment and supplies from
the core to create three levels of living and working space.

 A docked rocket engine
called a multi-directional propulsion bus (MDPB) will eventually allow
the station—the first one is tentatively called CSS [Commercial Space
Station] Skywalker—to maneuver within Earth’s orbit or even leave it,
for, say, a trip to the moon.

Welcome to your
Space Hotel Lobby! Fiberglass panels will cover the fabric webbing,
visually dividing the module’s living areas. Open passages will connect
the levels.

By Donald Cook
Extreme Technology